Firstly, love your site- has been very useful to me on a number of
occasions. Secondly, I have worked out a process to remap the F14 & F15 keys in Mac OS
X 10.4.1. These keys aren't selectable in the Dashboard & Expose or Keyboard
& Mouse (Keyboard Shortcuts) System Preferences panes (effectively they are
invisible to the remapping facilities).
I really needed the default Expose hotkeys (F9, F10 & F11) for another application and thought I'd remap all
the functions to the handy group of 3 keys on my Apple Pro USB keyboard
(F13, F14 & F15) that I never use. OS X's built in remapping facilities will
let you remap to F13 but not F14 or F15.

F14 & F15 are used as brightness controls for attached Apple displays (I
have a 20" Cinema Display and they work for those but didn't work for my
previous LCD - an IBM T750).

Here is how to remap to F14 & F15 (included is F13 even though you can
actually remap to this OK using system prefs).

Apologies for verbosity of the description!

This procedure was conducted with an Apple Pro USB keyboard connected to a
PowerMac G4 Mirrored Drive Doors (MDD) FW800 Dual 1.25Ghz PowerPC Mac with OS
X 10.4 (Tiger). It may or may not work with other keyboards (for example
Powerbooks etc.) or with previous versions of OS X.

Essentially you need to edit the keyboard shortcuts PLIST file and
manually define the keys you want to use to the particular function
(sounds easy but there is no description that I could find that described
which entries in the PLIST file matched which function - I eventually
worked it out via the tried and true trial and error method).

There are a couple of things you need before you can execute this
process:-

1) You need a copy of the Property List Editor application. This
application is included in the Xcode Tools install (Xcode Tools can be
downloaded from the Apple Developer Connection section of the Apple
website (http://developer.apple.com/). It's a big download (about 750MB).
If you don't have Xcode Tools or don't want to download the lot just to
get the Property List Editor have someone who has a copy of the Property
List Editor to you (it's 300KB) (can't see why it wouldn't work as an
install without the rest of the Xcode Tools but no guarantees!).

2) You need to have a version of the com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file
on your system. This file is located in
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist
(where the ~ refers to the symbolic for the path for the current user (i.e. on my machine it's
Users/xxxxx - so therefor the full path is Users/xxxxx/
Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist). If you have never
altered the default hotkey settings or keyboard shortcuts (for Expose,
Dashboard or any other preset) then this file won't exist. As soon as you
use the System Preferences for Expose or Keyboard (Keyboard Shortcuts)
then this file will be created (with only the entries for the
shortcuts/hotkeys you changed that override the default settings).

I found that the easiest way to execute the changes was to access the
Expose System Preferences item and change all of them to something else
(i.e. All Windows (F1), Application Windows (F2), Desktop (F3) and
Dashboard (F4)). This results in the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file being created
with the appropriate entries already existing (so you can just change the
relevant values without having to add the whole lot!).

Note also that, if you have more than one user defined and you want the
changes to apply to all those users, you will have to create and edit the
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file for each one
(or copy the one to each users path).

Also, (for those who don't know), an undocumented feature of the Expose
and Dashboard functions is that, if you hold down the Shift key while
hitting the Expose or Dashboard hotkeys, they perform the same functions
but do it sloooowly (try it - its pretty groovy). When you change the
hotkeys to create the plist file as I mentioned above, 2 entries are
created for each function - one for the hotkey itself and one for the
modifier key function (in this case Shift). So you will also need to alter
the modifier key entries to match the hotkey you decide to use for each
function (if, that is, you want to - I would suggest you do so otherwise
the modifier key definition will be left set to the 'old' key setting and
I'm not sure what the consequences (if any) of this may be).

You presumably could also change the modifer value to one of the other
modifier keys (Control, Option or Command (Apple)). I haven't tried this
but here are the relevant modifer keys and their values if you want to try
(I know the value for Shift is definately correct):-

1) Make a backup of the
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file (in case
something goes wrong! Although, if you just delete the file then
everything goes back to the default settings (obviously you will lose any
changes you made to the default settings for any keyboard shortcuts)).

3) On the Menu Bar click File - Open and navigate to the
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file, select it and
click Open.

4) In the resulting window, expand (click on) the triangle (twistie) next
to Root then the twistie next to AppleSymbolicHotKeys.

5) You will see a bunch of numbered entries with their own twisties. For
each one you want to change, you need to click on (the twistie):-

The number (i.e. 32) then

value then

parameters

6) For each parameters entry there are 3 numbered entries (0, 1 & 2). The
entry you want to change for the key that is pressed to initiate the
function is the entry numbered '1'. You change the value by double
clicking the entry in the Value column and overtyping with the new key
value. In the entries for the modifier keys, if you want to also change
the modifier value as well as the key value, then the entry for the
modifier value is the entry numbered '2'.

7) The relevant Expose and Dashboard Shortcut (hotkey) numbers are:-

All Windows = 32
All Windows Modifier = 34

Application Windows = 33
Application Windows Modifier = 35

Desktop = 36
Desktop Modifier = 37

Dashboard = 62
Dashboard Modifier = 63

8) The relevant values for the F13, F14 & F15 keys are:-

F13 = 105
F14 = 107
F15 = 113

9) When you have changed the key value(s) for the Expose or Dashboard
function(s) you want to change, on the Menu Bar click File - Save.

10) Log off and logon (or restart) and test it out (I found that sometimes
the changes were immediate without logging off but sometimes they did not
'take' until a log off/restart).

I set my keys up as:-

F13 = Desktop
F14 = Application Windows
F15 = All Windows

Note:- when you go to the Keyboard Shortcuts System Preferences pane and
scroll down to the Dock, Expose, and Dashboard entries, for those
functions where you have set F14 or F15 as the shortcut key(s), in the
Shortcut column there will be a blank space where it usually lists the
key(s) that is set. Don't worry - it's not set to nothing, it just cannot
display the key (because it doesn't 'know' those keys). Also, when you go
to the Dashboard and Expose System Preferences Pane, if you have set F14
or F15 for any of those functions, the key shown in the listbox will
display as F1 - once again, don't worry - it's not actually set to F1 - it
seems this Preferences pane partially 'knows' the keys.

Presumably you could also assign other functions apart from Expose or
Dashboard to the F14 & F15 keys using this method. The easiest way to
figure out which entry in the plist file is associated to the function you
want to assign F14 or F15 to would be to:-

1) Open the plist file with the Property List Editor and note the numbers
that currently exist.

2) Go to System preferences and select Keyboard Shortcuts and change the
function you want to change to something other than its default.

3) Open the plist file again with the Property List Editor and there
should be a new numbered entry for the function you just changed via
Keyboard Shortcuts.

4) Change the value for the key pressed to the value for F14 or F15 using
the method described above.

It may also be possible to remap functions to the other non-standard keys
on the keyboard (such as the Volume Up/Down, Mute and Eject keys) but I do
not know (nor could find anywhere) what the value of these keys are. If
anyone has or knows where I can find a utility for displaying the key
values of a Mac keyboard when the keys are pressed, then I would be very
appreciative and I will test it out (there are lots of these types of
things for PCs but I could not find a single one for the Mac - and the PC
ones running under VirtualPC aren't helpful because the scan codes for
those keys never make it to Windows (VirtualPC) to be scanned - and I'm
guessing the Windows Keyboard Driver in Virtual PC translates the key scan
codes it gets from the Mac anyhow to the PC equivalent so the accuracy of
the data is questionable).

Hope this tip can be of some use to you or users of your website.
Regards, Ralph P.